I just stumbled upon a wonderful archaeo-website, mostly frozen in 1999, and personally meaningful: https://www.mklinux.org
This is the homepage of MkLinux, the long-defunct but historically important effort to port Linux onto PowerPC Macs. A pre-Jobs Apple co-funded this open-source project as an experimental step towards what would eventually become Mac OS X.
It was my first Linux. And I remember in a flash how people would pronounce it "McLinux”, and how I hated that so much, arggh.
@jmac Did MKLinux not stand for 'Microkernel Linux', and was it not an attempt to build a NeXTStep like operating system on top of Linux?
NeXTStep used the Mach kernel, which genuinely was a microkernel; Linux (particularly in those days) was much more monolithic, and I always wondered how the project of using it as a microkernel would work.
@simon_brooke @jmac my understanding was that they carved Linux up into a series of cooperating servers running under a Mach microkernel. So the “Linux” in mkLinux was a fairly radical fork, not just e.g. a vmlinuz image built from an upstream source tarball.
(I ran mkLinux on a PowerMac 7100 back in the day. It required heaps of RAM because it didn’t support dynamic linking.)
jmac
Simon Brooke
Tabby